Todd, Tim and Kellan Cook love Baseball, the Seattle Mariners and trekking around the country to visit stadiums and watch games. These are their stories. #FatherSonBaseball

Warming Up For 2008

My parents are two of the luckiest people around. During the regular season, they live at my boyhood home about 15 miles from Safeco Field. During Spring Training, they live at their winter home about 3 miles from the Mariners spring training home — the Peoria Sports Complex.

Before the 2008 season began, Colleen, Tim and I headed to Peoria to meet up with my folks and my Mariners for some Spring Training.

Courtesy of Google Maps, here is an aerial view of the Peoria Sports Complex:

At the top center is the stadium where the Mariners and Padres play their home spring training games. The Mariners spring training fields are below to the left. The two fields to the far left are the Mariners Single-A training fields. The next two fields to the right are the Mariners Double-A and Triple-A fields. Next, is the Mariners secondary Major League field. Above that field is the Mariners administrative building and parking lot. Next to the administrative building to the right is the Mariners primary Major League field. Below the primary field, is a partial field where they do infield drills.

Then on the right side, the Padres have a mirror image of the Mariners training fields.

Spring training is incredibly cool and relaxing. One thing I love is all of the open grass between the training fields. It is a perfect set up that allowed us to watch the Mariners run drills and take BP while my dad and I played a lot of catch:

Those pictures are all taken in the grass between the Mariners Major League fields and the administrative building, which also has a big bullpen set up and indoor batting cages lining the big open grass area. In fact, you can see the bullpens behind my dad and Tim in the top two of the last four-picture set.

In the first day or two of our trip, we just watched the Mariners training. Here is Ichiro watching Raul Ibanez taking BP on the main field:

Every time we went to training, we’d walk away with a new baseball or two…

…with all of the fields around the public area, it is not unusual for random foul balls to be hit into the public area from all directions. You have to stay alert.

On our first day there, we ran into Mariners catching prospect Adam Moore who was working out one-on-one with a coach on the secondary Major League field…

…after he finished up, we got his autograph on one of the baseballs Tim had collected earlier in the day and got Tim’s first picture with a professional ballplayer. Finally, at the end of 2009, Moore made the Mariners major league roster. Hopefully we will see a lot of him in 2010.

I really enjoyed watching the Minor Leaguers…

…they were always doing drills, taking BP, or playing games.

Ah, remember how I mentioned it is relaxing at Spring Training…

…this is an ideal way to spend a morning, relaxing with your family and playing catch with your dad while watching the Mariners prepare for the regular season.

Yep, and then we got more baseballs…

…and Tim got Willie “Ballgame” Bloomquist to sign that little bat.

Spring Training is also good for normal bats too…

…that’s a bat that my dad got from a Mariners minor leaguer. No cracks or anything. Just a nice fully-intact bat. Tim and I got two bats from minor leaguers as well, both with small cracks.

Here’s another cool part of Spring Training…

…Mariners are always walking by 5 feet away from you.

While my dad and I would play catch, Tim would run around with his grandma…

…or would get a lot of piggy back rides.

Soon, it was time for some games, so we would head to the main stadium in the afternoons:

All around the outside of the stadium, there were a bunch of big concrete baseballs…

…that Tim would try to push around, unsuccessfully.

Here is a view of the main stadium:

I’m not going to do game reports here. Just a few highlights.

Here is a view of where we sat at most of the games:

…a great view.

When we arrived at Spring Training, they’d already played a bunch of games. And Ichiro was batting .000 (zero hits so far). He was something like 0-20.

His luck would change as soon as we arrived. Actually, he didn’t play in our first game. But in his very first at-bat that Tim and I saw him have in the spring, he got his first hit of the spring…

…and he got at least 1 hit in all three games we saw him play during the spring. Specifically, he went 1-4, 2-4 with a homerun, and 1-4.

During one of the games, I took “The Ruthian” challenge:

And I demolished it.

On this trip, I also was able to achieve a life long dream…

…my first ever Mariners game (or any professional baseball game) on my birthday. I always wished growing up that I could have rounded up a bunch of my friends and gone to a Mariners game on my birthday. But its hard to do when you weren’t born during the baseball season. So this was a real special treat for me. And, as a special gift, Ichiro and Adrian Beltre both hit a homerun for me, and the Mariners got me the win.

For our final spring training game, we sat on the outfield berm…

…Colleen, Tim and I all came down with a cold. So this was an odd game sitting out there.

But we still managed to get a picture that I absolutely love:

So, Tim’s first spring training was a smashing success. We came home with 12 baseballs, 2 bats, a couple autographs, a winning Mariners record of 2-1-1, and a lot of great memories.

BUT WAIT…our pre-season baseball wasn’t finished yet.

Several of my colleagues are big Phillies fans and share the “weekend” ticket package…or maybe its just the “Sunday” ticket package. Whatever. The Phillies had two more pre-season games after breaking camp in Florida. They call it the “On Deck” series. And one of my colleagues gave us their tickets because no one in the group was going to use them.

So, a day or two before opening day, Tim and I headed down to Philadelphia for a freezing cold game against the Blue Jays.

This was our view from our seats in Section 130:

As I said, ITWASFREEZING!!! So, we got hot dogs to warm us up:

And we were excited to see our favorite Phil, Jamie Moyer, toeing the rubber:

After having such a laid back time at Spring Training, Tim re-acclimated to his Northeastern roots and jumped all over the umpire…

…”Come on you stinking bum, you need glasses or something!?”

Okay, he wasn’t really saying that. But I LOVE that picture. Hilarious.

It was so cold that we gave up our excellent seats and headed over to the sunny seats in the leftfield porch:

Still, it was so cold that the unthinkable happened, by about the fourth inning Tim suggested that we should go home!

I was fine leaving early. So we made a deal that we’d leave after spending one inning behind the Phils dugout watching Moyer up close. We made our way over there in time to see Pat Burrell step to the plate…

…of course, as he seemingly always does when Tim is in the house, Burrell hit a bomb…

…although not on this pitch.

We got a great close-up view of Moyer on the mound:

Then some nice fan took a picture of me, Tim and my vacation-hold-over-beard…

…which I am told made me look about 50 years older than I actually am. Oh, well.

And with that, we called it a day, and a pre-season, and we went home and waited for our favorite holiday, Mariners opening day.

7 Comments

wow, i stay right next to the sports complex in the la quinta most years I go there in the summer, and my relatives live tenminutes away from there. i love that area, and the last two years ive walked around { in 105 heat} and picked up a bunch of abanded baseballs around the complex, which i just use for playing catch. your parents are extremely lucky.

JOE-
Cool, man. Maybe we’ll run into each other at spring training some time. I don’t get to spend a lot of time in AZ, but it definitely seems cool. My folks get to see lots of interesting stuff in addition to spring training, like the fall ball when they have teams composed of groups of players from different MLB teams.

Todd,
Thanks for the beautiful bird’s eye view of Peoria Sports Complex! The arrangement of baseball fields reminds me of four-leaf clovers (the minor league fields at the end) and Phalenopsis orchid flowers (the major league fields and the building with a parking lot).http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Phalaenopsis_lindenii_toapel.jpg
(please rotate the bird’s eye photo of the baseball fields by 45 degrees, so that the building with a parking lot is viewed at the top)

VIG-
Yep. Spring Training is good stuff. Be sure to check it out if you ever get a chance.

NAO-
Good call. I wonder if they planned that. And, thanks for the holiday wishes. Same to you! We had a great day today with my folks who are visiting from Seattle. Hey, only a few days now until 2010…and then Spring Training will be right around the corner!

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